Qualitative Methodologies

Mystery Shop

The trend today has moved towards turning every customer into a mystery shopper, we have too (it's a good thing), either by providing comment cards or more often, by providing a website or phone number on the receipt where the customer is able to register their opinions. However, this methodology suffers a few disadvantages. With any self-selected sampling, it tends to be the extremes that voice their opinion, not necessarily the average customer. That methodology also tends to suffer a very low completion rate. Attempting to collect every customer's opinions is a good strategy, but it shouldn't be considered a perfect substitute for a mystery shopper study, conducted by trained market research professionals.

A typical mystery shop generally consists of one person entering a business and interacting with employees. After the shop is over the secret shopper fills out a questionnaire that may cover any number of topics, including, but deffinitely not limited to:

Appearance of store

Friendliness of employees

Time before greeted

Cleanliness of the store

Proper placement of marketing materials

Availability of parking

Employees properly introduce themselves

Employees helpfulness

Whether target products & services were presented

Appropriate probing and identifaction of customer needs

We also regularly conduct mystery shop studies over the phone and through email.

Mystery shops are a good tool for ensuring that your employees are treating your customers in a manner that is consistent with their training.

Robinson Research never uses secret shoppers recruited by radio advertisements or social media. We only employ trained interviewers who have worked in our office on other projects.

Robinson Research also regularly conducts in-store audits of advertising placements for our clients. In such a case, a marketer may have concerns regarding whether or not their advertisements and marketing materials are being properly displayed. Robinson Research will send out a trained interviewer to surreptitiously audit the store and report back to the client.